French President Emmanuel Macron looked to cement his legacy, and take on political opponents, with the inauguration on Monday of a monument to the French language deep in far-right heartland.
Macron used the occasion to wade into a culture war debate, backing a right-wing bill to ban the use of "inclusive language" -- a popular trend for using both masculine and feminine versions of words when writing.
France must "not give in to fashionable trends," he said as he inaugurated the Cite Internationale de la Langue Francaise just hours before the Senate was due to debate the proposed law.
Modern French presidents love a cultural "grand projet" -- an imposing monument to "scratch" their name on history, as ex-leader Francois Mitterrand put it in the 1980s.
Mitterrand was an avid and controversial legacy-builder, transforming the Louvre museum with a glass pyramid, and erecting the vast Opera Bastille and National Library.
Georges Pompidou built a famous modern art museum in Paris, and Jacques Chirac created the Quai Branly global culture museum on the banks of the Seine.
The practice fell out of fashion this century, but has been revived by Macron, who was already eyeing up a crumbling chateau in the small town of Villers-Cotterets while still a presidential candidate in 2017.
He has overseen the renovation of the Renaissance castle, completed in 1539 under King Francois I, and its transformation into an international centre for the French language.
It hopes to attract 200,000 visitors a year to its large library (replete with AI-supported suggestion engine), interactive exhibits and cultural events.
Perhaps fittingly, the website seems determinedly uninterested in the quality of its English translations, describing the castle as a "high place of the French history and architecture".
No.
The French have started using new typographic conventions to turn nouns and adjectives neutral, or at least dual-gendered. French is a deeply gendered language by default, so for instance the word for author is "auteur" if the author is male and "autrice" if the author is female. If unknown, then... The author is assumed male.
This is of course not great, and so the French people have started using constructions like "auteur.ice" or somesuch in order to include both options in the word. This approach appears to have become reasonably popular.
The French right wing is EXTREMELY upset about this and is seeking to get it outright banned (they may already have succeeded actually).
As far as I understand this museum is the brainchild of the fascist party RN and is entirely about the French language as the right wing thinks it should be spoken, as opposed to how it actually is. So, just yet another instance of taxpayer-funded reactionary crap.
Without knowing much, I feel like it runs into the same problem as Latinx. It is unintuitive to speak the words how they are written. The specific auteur.ice example seems relatively easy to actually speak, but I'm sure other words run into the same problems.
Latinx is a word invented by white Americans to describe people from Latin America. But this is about French people using their own language in a new way.
No latinx is also a language reform movement in Latin America which targets spoken and written Spanish.
Really?
I guess it depends on what you consider to be a 'movement.'
People who know better use "latine." latinx is strictly (white) people on the internet who want to be divisive and use a society's natural inclusivity as a cudgel for their own ends.
We've been doing the whole "auteur(ice)" thing for decades already. It's not new. For as long as I can remember, every technical/educational book I've ever read in school did this.
Yikes.
Talk about a slippery slope.